Falter Read online

  “I like that he doesn’t, because he’s always home,” he said. “And I only just met him, so we have lots of catching up to do.”

  He was always saying stuff like that, sounding like a grown-up trapped in a kid’s body. I ruffled his hair. “You want to see some other rooms in headquarters?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Can we pretend to be on a mission, though? I want to help get bad guys.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Let’s see what kind of toys your mom brought in her big bag, huh? Do you think she brought some toy guns?”

  He climbed out of the chair. “Oh, I do think so. I really do.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Then you can pretend to be on a mission, and I’ll pretend to be a bad guy.”

  “What do you do to the bad guys?”

  “Shoot ‘em dead.” I grinned at him.

  He clapped his hands together.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ~jason~

  I entered the dining room to find Hallam scooping up Kenya. She had been trying to climb up the china cabinet. She was a toddler now, and she seemed to be getting into everything.

  Hallam and Marlena were like surrogate parents to Azazel and me. We had quite a history together, all of us. Way back before the solar flare, the four of us had all lived together in this house. Now, everything was expanded because Chance and Mina had come to stay as well, and because of Jude, Grace, and Boone, who Azazel and I had rescued. Technically, all of us lived here, and that was okay, because it was a big house.

  However, in practice, Jude was almost never here, and Grace, Boone, and Azazel weren’t around much either. Still, it could be crowded.

  Marlena had told me she was making a big dinner tonight, which meant some kind of pasta usually. Anyway, she wanted everyone together. That was why I’d shown up. But I could see that neither Boone, Jude, nor Azazel had decided to com.

  There was a big pot of fettucine alfredo in the middle of the table.

  Hallam snapped Kenya into her high chair while she protested she wanted a “big people chair.” Grace and Mina were setting the table. Marlena had a pitcher of iced tea, and she was pouring glasses.

  No one even looked up when I came in.

  Chance collided with the back of my legs. “You’re blocking the doorway, Daddy!”

  I teased him and tickled him until he squirmed away from me and ran to the other side of the room.

  “Chance, no running in the house,” scolded Mina.

  “My fault,” I said. “Come on, Chance, let’s sit down.”

  Kenya began wailing. She picked up her fork and threw it across the room.

  Hallam shot her an exasperated glance. “You aren’t big enough to sit in a big person chair, sweetheart. You wouldn’t be able to reach the table.”

  Marlena picked up the fork off the floor. “No, Kenya. We do not throw things.” Both Hallam and Marlena were British, and I had to admit that the sound of an angry British accent took me back to my own childhood, when I was scolded often by my mentor Anton.

  Kenya only wailed louder.

  Marlena sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Maybe I can cheer her up?” said Grace. She plopped down in a seat facing Kenya and began making faces at her.

  Kenya stopped screaming almost immediately. She pointed at Grace and declared her, “Silly.”

  Marlena sank down in the chair next to Grace. “Jason, you are so lucky to have missed this stage.”

  “No, you’re lucky she’s a girl,” said Mina, sitting down next to her. “When Chance was this age, he was a holy terror.”

  “Was I?” said Chance. “What did I do, Mommy?”

  “You were naughty,” said Mina. “You pulled all my books off my shelves.”

  “I did?” said Chance. “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  Mina smiled at him. “You are the sweetest little boy in the history of the world.”

  “I think so,” I said, kissing him on top of the head.

  “Should we eat?” said Hallam, sitting down next to me.

  “Let’s eat,” said Marlena. “Serve the kids first? Jason, hand me Chance’s plate.”

  I handed it to her.

  “How much do you want?” she asked.

  “Eew,” said Chance, getting a good look at the food. “Broccoli?”

  “You like broccoli,” I told him. “Doesn’t he, Mina?” Mina had this idea that the best way to nip picky eating in the bud was to pretend it didn’t exist. I followed her lead.

  “Yes,” she said. “You love broccoli. It’s one of your favorites.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Chance. “I don’t like it at all.”

  “I remember you eating it all up and asking for seconds,” said Mina.

  “Well, I don’t remember that,” said Chance.

  “I do.” She shrugged.

  “Trust me,” I said to him, “broccoli is awesome.” I handed him his plate. “Especially when it’s all covered in alfredo sauce. You’ll see.”

  He scrunched up his face. “Well, maybe I could pretend that the broccoli are all the bad guys that are trying to capture the Nephilim, and I have to kill ‘em dead.”

  I stiffened. “What? Where did you hear that, Chance?”

  “From Mommy Zaza,” he said. “I played with her at headquarters yesterday.”

  “You did?” I said.

  Mina handed her plate to Marlena. “I took him over there. You were at the gym, and I couldn’t get through on your phone. I forgot I needed someone to watch him that day.”

  Oh right. I hadn’t answered my phone because seeing that woman in the parking lot had upset me so much. I’d gone on a drive to try to gather my thoughts. I should have been available. “I’m sorry. I promise I’ll always answer my phone from now on. You don’t have to call Azazel.”

  Mina picked up her fork and began to twirl fettuccine on it. “It’s no big deal. She was happy to do it.”

  Maybe she was. That didn’t mean that I wanted Chance to know about Nephilim. I’d worked so hard to keep that away from him. I didn’t want him tainted by the violent part of our lives. I turned to Chance. “What did she tell you?”

  Chance popped a piece of broccoli in his mouth and chewed. “Hey, you’re right, I do like these.”

  “Don’t talk while you’re chewing,” said Mina.

  Chance made a show of chewing and swallowing.

  “You want some pasta?” said Marlena.

  I handed her my plate.

  “She told me that you and Uncle Jude and Grace and Boone were all Nephilim and that there were bad guys after you guys. She said that when she went to work, she went on missions and shot all the bad guys until they were dead.” Chance made a pistol with one hand. He pretended to shoot it at me. “Bang! Bang! You’re dead.”

  I was stunned.

  Marlena handed me back my plate.

  It was hard for me to talk. “She told you that?”

  “Yup,” said Chance. “And we played too. I pretended to shoot her, and she pretended to die, and it was so funny because she took forever.” He giggled just thinking about it.

  “She made you laugh at shooting people?” I said. I was starting to get angry.

  “Jason,” said Mina, “it’s no big deal. It’s not like he doesn’t watch TV. He runs around shooting bad guys all the time. And what you guys do, it’s like the real thing. Of course, he’d be interested.”

  “It’s not like TV.” I couldn’t believe Azazel would do that. Was she crazy? I pushed my chair away from the table.

  “Are you leaving, Jason?” said Marlena.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “Sorry.”

  * * *

  ~azazel~

  “Jason? What are you doing here?” I’d stood up when the door to my apartment had been thrust open. I’d been looking over some of the video surveillance that Boone had set up to try
to figure out where the heads of the blood ring were.

  Jason stalked over to me. “How dare you?” His face was stony, his voice like ice. I’d seen him this angry before, but I’d never seen him so angry with me.

  “How dare I what?”

  “How dare you say that stuff to Chance? All I want is to keep him away from this, and you turn it into a game? You turn killing people into a game?”

  “Killing vampires.”

  “Who are people, Azazel. Or have you forgotten that?”

  “They’re not exactly good people, though. I mean, they deserve it,” I said.

  “We deserve it,” he said. “Or have you forgotten that too?”

  I sighed. “I’m sorry, Jason. Chance was asking me questions. Did you want me to lie?”

  “I don’t want him here,” he said. “I don’t ever want you to bring him back here.”

  That hurt. I’d had a lot of fun with Chance. We’d played games together, and I’d entertained him for hours. It had been exhilarating, but it had also been exhausting. I’d done it at as a favor to Mina. And now Jason was acting like I’d done something horrible to Chance? I would never hurt Chance. “There’s nothing wrong with this place, Jason. There’s nothing wrong with what I do.”

  “You don’t think so?” He shook his head. “You don’t think there’s anything wrong with killing people?”

  “I don’t just kill people randomly. I kill people who are oppressing other people. And I do it because there isn’t anything in place in the regular law to deal with stuff like that.”

  “You can try and dress it up all you want, Azazel. We both know that you don’t have the right to make moral decisions like this for other people. Your parents thought I was evil, and they wanted you to kill me. You decided the vampires are evil, and now you want to kill them. But it’s not that simple. And I don’t want Chance thinking it’s that simple either. I don’t want him to think there’s a good reason to kill people.”

  I turned my back on him and started to gather up stacks of photos and put them in neat piles on my coffee table. “You’re wrong. It is that simple. We tried to make it complicated, Jason, but sometimes people are bad, and they don’t deserve any better.”

  “I can’t believe you would say that.”

  “Well, I did,” I said. “And if I watch Chance again, I’ll play whatever games I want with him.”

  He caught me by the shoulder and turned me to face him. “Oh, no, you won’t. I don’t want you putting ideas like that in my son’s head.”

  “You can’t control everything he sees and hears, Jason. He’s a little sponge. He soaks it all up. And if you want me to keep what I’m doing from him, then it’s like you want me out of his life, because I’ll have to hide things from him whenever we’re together.”

  “Maybe you should hide stuff like this,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so proud of it.”

  We hadn’t argued about my killing vampires in a long time, and whenever I brought it up, Jason said he wasn’t angry about it anymore. But clearly, he hadn’t let it go at all. He didn’t approve. And until we could get on the same page about this stuff, he and I would never be able to make things work. “If you don’t like this about me, Jason, you don’t like me anymore. Because this is important to me. It’s something I think is worth doing.”

  “You can’t understand how this made me feel,” he said. “You don’t have any of your own children, and so you have no idea how much I want to protect Chance. You can’t know what that’s like. You’ve never felt it.”

  My lips parted. He hadn’t just said that to me. He couldn’t have. I started to tremble. “You need to leave now.”

  He seemed to realize he’d crossed a line. “Jesus, Azazel, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Just go away,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I didn’t think about what I was saying.”

  “Fine, I’ll leave.” I pushed past him, into the hallway, and as I slammed the door after myself, I felt the first tears prick my eyes. Jason should never have been so insensitive. He knew how badly I’d wanted to have a baby. But I’d never been pregnant, not really. And now my body was technically dead, so I didn’t think it would be possible for me to carry a child to term. When I ingested blood, it reversed my age to the point in time before I died. I could never grow older, so I didn’t think I could have a baby. I never would.

  It might have been okay if Jason and I were raising Chance as our own. But things hadn’t worked out that way, and while I was close with Chance, Mina would always be his mother. Even though I was the one who had taken care of him when he was a tiny baby, the one who’d mixed formula for him and changed his diapers and rocked him to sleep at night while battles raged just a few miles away.

  I hadn’t lived the kind of life that was safe for a baby. I never had. Honestly, I still didn’t. It was probably all for the best. That didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt. And I didn’t long for a child of my own sometimes.

  Jason came after me. “I never should have said that.”

  “But you did.” I picked up my feet and began to run down the hallway. Tears were streaming down my face now, and they were blurring my eyesight.

  Jason was running too. He caught me, pulling me into his arms. “You were his mother once. You were the closest thing he had anyway. Of course you know what I mean.”

  I sobbed against him for a minute.

  But it didn’t feel right. His arms weren’t tightening around me. I didn’t feel safe and comforted against him. I pulled away, my tears drying up.

  He sighed. “You still don’t want to touch me.”

  “I do,” I said. “I want to. I want this all to go away. But Jason, I’m starting to wonder if this is bigger than a little mishap in the bedroom.”

  “If you call my killing you a mishap.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “Maybe it took that for us to see how far we’ve drifted away from each other.”

  “We’re not drifting,” he said. “I mean, so I was mad, but it’s not like we haven’t argued before.”

  He was right about that. Jason and I argued a lot. At one point, we’d even had huge armies which we’d sent against each other, trying to destroy the other. We had kind of an epic amount of conflict in our relationship. “This is different, though.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s the same.”

  “You think I’m a bad influence on Chance. Do you have any idea how much that hurts?”

  “I never said that,” he said. “See, there you go twisting my words again.”

  “Whatever, it’s what you meant.”

  “No, what I said is what I meant,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “The point is, you don’t approve of killing the vampires. And it’s what I do now. So, you don’t approve of me.”

  He ran his hand through his hair. “It’s more complicated than that.” He let out a noisy breath. “I saw a woman the other day who recognized me from the recruitment YouTube videos for Jasontown. She still adored me. And I wanted to...”

  This was coming out of left field. Why was he telling me this? Who was this woman? “You wanted to what?”

  He fidgeted with the edge of his t-shirt. “I don’t know. I wanted to take her somewhere and...”

  “What? You wanted to fuck her?”

  “No.” He glared at me. “Don’t get bent out of shape and jealous.”

  Oh, now he was accusing me of jealousy? “I’m only saying you’re telling me some strange woman threw herself at you. Did she have red hair?”

  He backed away. “You know what? Never mind. I can’t talk to you about this.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “Yeah, well, telling your girlfriend that you’re attracted to another woman is probably not the greatest idea, just so you know.”

  “Seriously. Drop it.” He turned and walked down the hall.

  I watched him go. I didn’t call him back. He wan
ted me to drop it? Fine. I could handle that.

  * * *

  ~jason~

  I sat on a bench in the park. I could see Chance on the playground. He was climbing the slide to go down it again. The first few times I’d taken him here, I’d wandered around with him everywhere. I mentioned to Mina once that it was exhausting, and she just laughed. She said that she took him to the park and let him run off by himself. She sat down and relaxed. The thought of that hadn’t even occurred to me, but when I asked Chance if he minded if I just watched, he was excited to play with the other kids. Since then, I’d spent most of our park trips on the bench. Sometimes I looked stuff up on my phone, read articles on the internet and that kind of thing.

  But not today. Today, I was just watching Chance and trying to collect my thoughts.

  Things between Azazel and me were not good. They were worse than they’d been before. Before, it had only been awkward. Now, there was actual tension.

  I couldn’t talk to her. She didn’t understand me, not really. Her relationship with violence was different than mine. She found it distasteful, but necessary. I found it... exciting. Whenever I tried to tell her that, she always seemed sort of disgusted and afraid. Usually, we made it through that, but right now, we were so messed up that I didn’t want to risk her reaction.

  On the playground, Chance sped down the slide, his red hair fluttering in the air. He was laughing.

  I was glad he was doing okay.

  I was screwed up because of the way I’d been brought up. I hadn’t had the most normal of childhoods. As long as traumatizing things didn’t happen to Chance, then he would be okay. He wouldn’t be like me.

  Mina assured me that little boys often got a kick out of the idea of shooting bad guys. She said that his excitement about it was nothing to worry about.

  But I wasn’t so sure. The Sons had told me that the people they wanted me to shoot were bad guys. I had a brief flash of a room in a sorority house, dead girls everywhere. I shook myself. I didn’t want to think about that.

  Anyway, as long as we kept Chance away from the stuff with the vampires, he’d forget about whatever Azazel had told him. He’d be safe.